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Alternative title: now your web apps, just like your native apps, can have unpredictable drag/resize/snap/double click to maximize behavior! Ugh. I wish apps
by Arainach 4y ago
Alternative title: now your web apps, just like your native apps, can have unpredictable drag/resize/snap/double click to maximize behavior!
Ugh. I wish apps would leave reusable consistent system UI elements alone. Has Adobe gotten around to making their title bars DPI-aware yet?
Every app that tries this gets at least something wrong. Let's take a look on a random sampling of native-ish Windows apps:
Discord (Electron): Supports right click for the system menu, but doesn't change the icon to show whether a window is maximized or restored. Doesn't change color based on active or inactive state. In fact, doesn't change anything at all, not even the subtle 1px window border Windows 10+ uses. Shame on them. For a long time, I believe they didn't support dragging a maximized window back to restored, but it works now.
Facebook Messenger: Not awful. Proper height, double clicks to maximize/restore work, right click for system menu works. Title bar doesn't change when inactive, but the left menu uses the glass effect to make it sufficiently obvious. Also no double-click to close, but this is one of the better attempts I've seen.
Chrome [bias: I work on Chrome]: Gets the important bits right. Chrome does it far better than most apps, since they use the Windows APIs to draw over the native title bar, which means they get my system colors and some other things included.
Microsoft Office (let's pick on Word): Ugh. Ugggggggh. Bright white as the burning sun and their only affordance towards showing if the window is active is changing the text to a light gray that has no contrast when inactive. What's a button? Where can you click to drag? Nobody knowwwwwws. Why is there a search box in the middle with a big empty space to the left? Why is the title off-center to the left of that search box? Has anyone in the last 12 years ever actually noticed the customizable set of buttons in the upper left and used them? (Answer: no). Office gets the most hate in my mind for initially popularizing it and in particular the "if Microsoft does it it's OK if we all do it" effect. Starting in Office 2010 or so the Office Apps have had some of the worst title bars I've ever seen, but everyone has copied them.
Firefox: Repeated the sins of legacy Microsoft Edge and leaves no space above the tab to drag, but to its credit does leave a small square in the left (and on the right if you fill it with tabs) so in theory you should never get stuck with a partially-offscreen window you can't drag without closing tabs. Overloads right click and doesn't include the system menu.
Steam: Almost no difference between active and inactive. Multiple tiers of menus at the top, all of which let you drag for some reason. DPI Issues.
....anyway, I could go on for years, but stop implementing custom title bars.
- david2ndaccount 4y agoChrome hides the app-icon in the top-left which breaks my muscle memory.
- hulitu 4y ago> Chrome [bias: I work on Chrome]: Gets the important bits right. Sigh. Titlebar highjacked, no menubar, small scrollbars, gray on gray (this is a "modern UI" pandemic).